A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY8 start with G start with G
"William James . . . has never seemed so vulnerably human as in Linda Simon's biography. . . . [S]he vivifies James in such a way that his life and thought come freshly alive for the modern reader."—David S. Reynolds, New York Times Book Review
"Superb. . . . Genuine Reality is recommended reading for all soul-searchers."—George Gurley, Chicago Tribune
"Ms. Simon . . . has provided an ideal pathway for James's striding. . . . [Y]ou become engaged in his struggles as if they were your own."—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times
"[A]n excellent narrative biography at once sensitively told and lucidly written."—John Patrick Diggins, Wall Street Journal
Mary Gluck introduces us to a Lukács we have never met. Here is Lukács among his friends, lovers, and peers in those important years before 1918, when he converted to Communism and Marxism at the age of thirty-nine.
Georg Lukács claimed in later life that his early achievements lacked genuine coherence, being expressions of a vague "romantic anticapitalism" that only found resolution in his conversion to Marxism. By integrating Lukács with his early generational grouping and making expert use of a new treasure trove of documents from his early years, Gluck demonstrates that revolutionary socialism was not the inevitable outcome of Lukács' early cultural radicalism, but only one of several possible options in the fragmented ideological climate of postwar Europe. From this new perspective, his pre-Marxist career takes on a cultural consistency that parallels and illuminates the inner strivings of the early modernists before the outbreak of World War I.
Lukács emerges in this generational portrait not only as dramatic and psychologically complex but also as a representative figure whose inner dilemmas were echoed in the lives of many other radical intellectuals who came of age during the fin de siêcle period. Gluck situates Lukács within a fascinating network of friends and associates, the so-called Sunday Circle, which included such people as Karl Mannheim, Arnold Hauser, Bela Balázs, and Anna Lesznai. She adeptly anchors this group within the context of social and economic transformations in Hungary that brought new conservative, antisemitic movements to the fore and that marginalized the assimilated Jewish middle classes to which Lukács and most of his friends belonged. Retracing their collective hopes and values helps to clarify the far-ranging cultural crisis associated with the decline of nineteenth-century liberal culture and the emergence of the modernist sensibility.
As Engel shows, in his search for the truth of Jewish mysticism Scholem molded the vast literature of Jewish mystical lore into a rich assortment of stories that unveiled new truths about the modern condition. Positioning Scholem’s work and life within early twentieth-century Germany, Palestine, and later the state of Israel, Engel intertwines Scholem’s biography with his historiographical work, which stretches back to the Spanish expulsion of Jews in 1492, through the lives of Rabbi Isaac Luria and Sabbatai Zevi, and up to Hasidism and the dawn of the Zionist movement. Through parallel narratives, Engel touches on a wide array of important topics including immigration, exile, Zionism, World War One, and the creation of the state of Israel, ultimately telling the story of the realizations—and failures—of a dream for a modern Jewish existence.
Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) is one of the great figures of early modern Europe, and one of the least understood. Ingrid D. Rowland’s biography establishes him once and for all as a peer of Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Galileo—a thinker whose vision of the world prefigures ours.
Writing with great verve and erudition, Rowland traces Bruno’s wanderings through a sixteenth-century Europe where every certainty of religion and philosophy has been called into question, and reveals how he valiantly defended his ideas to the very end, when he was burned at the stake as a heretic on Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori.
“A loving and thoughtful account of [Bruno’s] life and thought, satires and sonnets, dialogues and lesson plans, vagabond days and star-spangled nights. . . . Ingrid D. Rowland has her reasons for preferring Bruno to Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, even Galileo and Leonardo, and they’re good ones.”—John Leonard, Harper’s
“Whatever else Bruno was, he was wild-minded and extreme, and Rowland communicates this, together with a sense of the excitement that his ideas gave him. . . . It’s that feeling for the explosiveness of the period, and [Rowland’s] admiration of Bruno for participating in it—indeed, dying for it—that is the central and most cherishable quality of the biography.”—Joan Acocella, New Yorker
“Rowland tells this great story in moving, vivid prose, concentrating as much on Bruno’s thought as on his life. . . . His restless mind, as she makes clear, not only explored but transformed the heavens.”—Anthony Grafton, New York Review of Books
“[Bruno] seems to have been an unclassifiable mixture of foul-mouthed Neapolitan mountebank, loquacious poet, religious reformer, scholastic philosopher, and slightly wacky astronomer.”—Anthony Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review
“A marvelous feat of scholarship. . . . This is intellectual biography at its best.”—Peter N. Miller, New Republic
“An excellent starting point for anyone who wants to rediscover the historical figure concealed beneath the cowl on Campo de’ Fiori.”—Paula Findlen, Nation
"A brilliant juxtaposition of life and thought. . . . The sympathy of this pictorial biography is rivaled by few books on Nietzsche."—Charles M. Stang, Boston Book Review
"[A] distinguished addition to the Nietzsche-friendly corpus."—Alain de Botton, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"An odd and oddly endearing record of Nietzsche's travels."—John Banville, New York Review of Books
“[Tuan] explores answers to an old and unanswerable question: how should we live? . . . The Good Life is a little anthology of good feeling, touchstones of joy . . . These pleasures make the book a pleasure, not of conviction or belief, but of conversation’s meandering exploration.”—New York Times Book Review
“Tuan, after all, is one of the few geographers who can be read for pleasure, and by the public as well as by the professional. But read not merely for pleasure, nor yet to mark, learn, and inwardly digest. Rather, consider Tuan’s challenge to identify your concept of the good life, and then try to construct that life.”—Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
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